Then and Now #64 (08/4 - 14/4)

Happy Sunday!  The Sunday Post is a blog news meme hosted @ Caffeinated Reviewer. See rules here: Sunday Post Meme. Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came in their mailbox during the last week.  It is hosted weekly over at Mailbox Monday and every Friday they do a round-up of some of their favourite, shared reads!

Last Week

Happy weekend! We're halfway through April, which is insane, and it also means that the semester is beginning again! I spent most of last week prepping for my module, scanning texts, creating assignments, and prepping the module handbook. I'm also still marking essays from last semester, as they only came in two weeks ago. I'm hoping to finish that in the coming days, so that I can give everyone their grades and feedback in a timely fashion. I give quite a lot of feedback, though, so it takes some time xD I was also at  a conference last weekend, which means it feels like I worked two weeks straight. The 10 hours on the train, however, did give me time to read!

I've been having quite some luck with my reads lately! Most of them have been really fun, like Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell. I'm currently reading Calypso by Oliver K. Langmead, which is a fascinating Sci-Fi book. I love how it's written, with each character having not just their own perspectives but also different formats of writing, if that makes sense. I kind of don't want to finish it yet, so I've decided that Sunday is set aside to re-binge the second season of Bridgerton. I adore the Kate and Anthony vibes and am not quite ready to let go of them yet.

Posted last week:

• BC - Let's Get Medieval #8 - Atlakviða
• Friday Friyay: Women Warriors: An Unexpected History by Pamela D. Toler
• Review: Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell
• BC #24 - What I read in March ~ Ali Hazelwood, Non Fiction, Fairy Tales
• Review: The Monstrous Misses Mai by Van Hoang

Recommendation

I fell in love with a track from the Dune: Part 2 soundtrack, 'Beginnings Are Such Fragile Things', and then found it on an hour-long loop. I've been listening to that non-stop while working.

Mailbox Monday

If Only by Vigdis Hjorth (9/3/2024; Verso Books)

A relatively young woman, aged thirty. She married in her early twenties, had two children. It is winter. January and minus 14°C, white, frosty mist around the parked car, around the spruces, the mailbox on its post, but higher up the sky is blue, clear, the sun has come back. She has written in her diary that she is waiting for the heartbreak that will turn her into her true self. She has an impending sense of doom or possibly her own death.

So opens Vigids Hjorth’s ground-breaking novel from 2001, which melds the yearning, doomed potency of Annie Ernaux’s A Simple Passion with the scale and force of Anna Karenina. It asks, can passion be mistaken for love? And proceeds to document the destruction a decade defined by such a misconstruction can yield on a life.

Vigdis Hjorth came on my radar because of my Norwegian language class. My teacher actually knows her and then he recommended some of her books to me. While I'm planning to read at least one in Norwegian, I saw this on NetGalley and couldn't resist. That cover is definitely leaning into the Barbie-core, but I love the spookiness of it as well.

My Darling Dreadful Thing by Johanna van Veen (5/16/2024; Poisoned Pen Press)

Spirits are drawn to salt, be it blood or tears. 

Roos Beckman has a spirit companion only she can see. Ruth—strange, corpse-like, and dead for centuries—is the light of Roos’ life. That is, until the wealthy young widow Agnes Knoop visits one of Roos’ backroom seances, and the two strike up a connection.

Soon, Roos is whisked away to the crumbling estate Agnes inherited upon the death of her husband, where an ill woman haunts the halls, strange smells drift through the air at night, and mysterious stone statues reside in the family chapel. Something dreadful festers in the manor, but still, the attraction between Roos and Agnes is undeniable.

Then, someone is murdered.

Poor, alone, and with a history of ‘hysterics’, Roos is the obvious culprit. With her sanity and innocence in question, she’ll have to prove who—or what—is at fault or lose everything she holds dear.

First thing that caught me was the title. And then there was the author name and I was like yessss, let's read something creepy by a Dutch author! Again, I should really be reading this in its original language, like Vigdis' books, but hey. I can only read what is available to me and in this case that's the translation. I look forward to reading this closer to autumn!

Model Home: A Novel by Rivers Solomon (10/1/2024; Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The three Maxwell siblings keep their distance from the lily-white gated enclave outside Dallas where they grew up. When their family moved there, they were the only Black family in the neighborhood. The neighbors acted nice enough, but right away bad things, scary things—the strange and the unexplainable—began to happen in their house. Maybe it was some cosmic trial, a demonic rite of passage into the upper-middle class. Whatever it was, the Maxwells, steered by their formidable mother, stayed put, unwilling to abandon their home, terrors and trauma be damned.

As adults, the siblings could finally get away from the horrors of home, leaving their parents all alone in the house. But when news of their parents' death arrives, Ezri is forced to return to Texas with their sisters, Eve and Emanuelle, to reckon with their family’s past and present, and to find out what happened while they were away. It was not a “natural” death for their parents . . . but was it supernatural?

Rivers Solomon turns the haunted-house story on its head, unearthing the dark legacies of segregation and racism in the suburban American South. Unbridled, raw, and daring, Model Home is the story of secret histories uncovered, and of a queer family battling for their right to live, grieve, and heal amid the terrors of contemporary American life.

I really liked Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon, I thought it was incredibly well-written, prosaic, lyrical, and creepy to boot. So of course I jumped at the chance to read another book of theirs! And I love a take on a potential haunted house, mixed with plenty of family trauma and the horrors of the 21st century. Also, stunning green on the cover!